Hello everybody, for the remainder of the cycle I would like to run "User Testing for Ubuntu Development". We all know how multiple improvements went into our documentation and infrastructure, but apart from occasional bug reports we don't really know how well it works for new contributors. There might even be a number of people who gave up after getting stuck without them letting us know.
This would be the first run of User Testing and I'd like it to be a timed experiment for the remainder of the release. It would be fairly general and at UDS we could discuss results and a plan forward. Future testing could be much more focused on specific things. The way this would work is: we announce the initiative and ask new contributors to introduce themselves by mailing an email address which is maintained by a small team. We'd ask them to read the Development Guide and try to get involved in Ubuntu development. Whatever they are interested in doing is of interest to us. We'd ask them to let us know about their experience. In return we are going to file bugs on docs, tools or infrastructure and tag them with 'devtesting', so we can track progress. Also we would help them to some degree (not necessarily do all their homework for them) if they should get stuck. This initiative would serve two purposes. Firstly, we'd get good feedback from new contributors, so we can improve our story and make plans at UDS. Secondly this is a great opportunity for new contributors who might be a bit hesitant still to show up on mailing lists, IRC or in merge proposals. I don't think this will be huge amounts of work, but very valuable instead. If you think this is a great idea and could imagine helping out a bit, please let me know privately. If you have additional thoughts or questions before we announce this, please comment. :-) Have a great day, Daniel -- Get involved in Ubuntu development! developer.ubuntu.com/packaging And follow @ubuntudev on identi.ca/twitter.com/facebook.com/gplus.to -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
